The title of Shohei Imamura’s Warm Water Under a Red Bridge doesn’t lie. It takes place in a Japanese port full of fluids, bodily as well as natural. Even the red bridge has a double meaning: it dominates the port, but it also represents the vagina of Saeko (Misa Shimizu), a woman who ejaculates huge streams of water when she has an orgasm or when sexual tension becomes too great. Disgruntled ex–salary man Yosuke (Koji Yakusho) searches for treasure by the red bridge, but the real gold turns out to lie in Saeko.

At the beginning of the film, Yosuke is at the end of his rope. Out of a job after his company is downsized, he dejectedly keeps going to interviews. The homeless Taro tells Yosuke that he once stole a gold Buddhist statue; when Taro dies, Yosuke heads to the town where Taro claimed to have hidden it. There his attention is drawn to Saeko while she’s shoplifting — but he’s attracted more by the puddle under her legs than by her crime.

Even in interiors, Imamura likes to divide the screen into several distinct spaces (the houses here are often shown in long shot and depicted as cluttered but neat). But the divide between land and water is the main one — and for all his fascination with Saeko, Yosuke is one of the few characters who can’t navigate it. On his first stint as a fisherman, he pukes and stumbles around the boat. An African student who fishes with a net gets chased around town, as much for his temerity in breaking the fishermen’s rules as out of racism. Not only does Saeko coat the window — and Yosuke’s clothes — with water when she comes but her water makes flowers bloom and draws fish from the sea.

Yosuke doesn’t quite find what he’s looking for, but he does discover a refuge from the hustle and bustle of Tokyo. Imamura has always been attracted to small-town Japan, seeing it as an alternative to the materialist, ultramodern culture of big cities and their consequent dehumanizing anomie. The late French film critic Serge Daney described Imamura’s 1979 Vengeance Is Mine as the tale of a man who has to kill in order to say no. To paraphrase Daney, The Eel (which shared the 1997 Cannes Palme d’Or with Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry) is the tale of a man who has to kill in order to say yes. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is gentler: a man simply has to find a place among a community of eccentrics in order to say yes.

Imamura’s recent rosy portraits of Japanese backwaters stems more from his imagination than from reality. Even if a threat of violence hangs overhead or kicks off the story, his past three films have all been about misfits finding solace among one another. (The only instance of violence in Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is pretty mild compared to the bloodshed in The Eel and 1999’s Dr. Akagi.) As seductive as these visions are, he’s repeating himself. At worst, Warm Water overdoses on its own cuteness.

Imamura started off as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, but when he began making his own films, he rebelled against his mentor’s placidity. Along with Nagisa Oshima, who began making films around the same time, his work in the late ’50s and ’60s made it clear that Angry Young Filmmakers were emerging everywhere in the world .

Still, the Angry Young Men of the ’60s have mellowed (except for Jean-Luc Godard, who has evolved into a Cranky Old Man). Imamura is no exception. Like Oshima, he has suffered several major interruptions in his career: in the early ’70s, he turned to documentaries, and eight years passed after 1989’s Black Rain. The Eel launched a new period, and it’s no insult to call these films the work of an old man.

Still, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge seems a little tired. Its whimsy is forced and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Homeless people and senile grandmothers are merely colorful, and racism is a joke. Much of the movie’s gravity falls on the shoulders of Koji Yakusho, a Kiyoshi Kurosawa regular who links Imamura to the new generation of Japanese filmmakers. (No one since Peter Falk in Columbo and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner has made a trenchcoat look so cool.) Despite this director’s professed admiration for strong women (it’s most evident in ’60s films like Intentions of Murder and The Insect Woman), Saeko’s desires get largely pushed aside until the end. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is Imamura’s most relaxed work. It’s also his most complacent.